PhD Problems: Wannabe Professors Need Not Apply. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, February 23, 2013.What’s the Use of a PhD? By Megan McArdle. The Daily Beast, February 21, 2013.The Humanities, Unraveled. By Michael Bérubé. The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 18, 2013. Also find it here.Mead:PhD
students are in serious trouble, and not only because the job market for
professors is shrinking more every day. Over at the Daily Beast Megan McArdle
offers some penetrating insights about the attempt of PhD programs to prepare
their students for jobs outside academia (called “alt-ac” jobs, alternative to
academic):

Unfortunately,
in many cases a PhD sends a negative rather than a positive signal. Some
employers are suspicious of people they figure will be a smartypants pain in
the ass with no real skills (I’m not endorsing this view, just reporting it).
But a bigger problem is that employers know why people get a PhD in Comp Lit or
Religious Studies: so they can be a professor. If you go on the job market with
that degree, they know that it’s almost certainly because you failed to get a
job as a professor.

Now,
most potential employers don’t know about the state of the academic job market:
that there were only two jobs even offered in anything close to your specialty
last year and one of them went to the son of a famous professor and the other
went to the top candidate from Harvard. Many will just think of you as someone
who couldn’t cut it in academia.

What
makes things worse is that PhD programs train you in a very narrow range of
skills really only suited for academia. PhD students are trained to write, but
only as professors write, which doesn’t usually translate well into journalism.
They’re trained to teach, but usually in the specialized context of large research
universities, so the degree wouldn’t really prepare you to teach at the high
school level, nor would it give you much of an edge in the brave new world of
MOOCs.People
with PhDs will have a very hard time getting jobs outside academia, just as
they will have a very hard time getting jobs inside academia. For many PhD
students, the long years they spent in the program added up, from a career
point of view, to a terrible waste of time. MacArdle writes: “I happen to think
it’s the most cruel, abusive labor market in America, doing terrible things to
bright and idealistic kids who want to be scholars.”It’s
hard not to see her point. PhD programs keep students poor for as much as ten
years, taking their time and their money and leaving them with very few prospects
on the other end. There are encouraging signs that reform is coming to higher
ed. Let’s just hope, for the sake of suffering PhD students, it comes as fast
as possible.

Professors on the Production Line, Students on Their Own. By Mark Bauerlein. American Enterprise Institute Working Paper, January 2009. Also find it here.Executive Summary:In
higher education in the United States, teaching and research in the fields of
language and literature
are in a desperate condition. Laboring on the age-old axiom
“publish-or-perish,” thousands
of professors, lecturers, and graduate students are busy producing
dissertations, books, essays, and reviews. Over the past five decades, their
collective productivity has risen from 13,000 to 72,000 publications per year.
But the audience for language and literature scholarship has diminished, with
unit sales for books now hovering around 300.At the
same time, the relations between teachers and students have declined. While 43
percent of
two-year public college students and 29 percent of four-year public college
students require remedial
coursework, costing $2 billion annually, one national survey reports that 37
percent of first-year
arts/humanities students “never” discuss course readings with teachers outside
of class, and 41 percent only do so “sometimes.”These
trends are not unrelated. Academic engagement on the part of students is a
reflection of how
much teachers demand it. But with the research mandate hovering over them,
teachers have no incentive to push it. If the system favors publication, not
mentoring, hours in the office in conversation with sophomores are
counter-productive or even damaging to career and livelihood.Universities
need to reconsider the relative value placed on research and teaching in the evaluation
of professors. This paper offers several recommendations, including limiting
the amount
of material that tenure committees will review and creating a “teacher track”
in which doctoral
students are trained and rewarded for generalist knowledge and multiple course
facility rather
than a highly-specialized expertise.